


Saint Jimmy

by ussnicole



Series: The Gospel of Saint Jimmy [2]
Category: Green Day
Genre: Alternate Origin Story, Alternate Universe - High School, Asshole Stepparents, Asshole parents, Bad Decisions, Blasphemy, Coming of Age, Drama, Gen, High School, Punk, Self Harm, Suicide, Underage Drinking, Underage Drug Use, teenage angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-26
Updated: 2016-11-26
Packaged: 2018-09-02 10:57:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8664982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ussnicole/pseuds/ussnicole
Summary: He's the son of rage and love, the Jesus of Suburbia.The gospel of Saint Jimmy, according to Billie Joe Armstrong.





	1. Saint Jimmy

"We, uh... we used to call him Saint Jimmy."

I never thought I would find myself here. Speaking at a funeral. His funeral. He had us all convinced he wasn't human. Yet here we are: his mother is crying silently in the first row, and there are other adults here I don't know. Even my mom and stepdad even showed up, not that I wanted them to.

When I finish speaking I don't sit with them. I slouch over to where Michael is sitting, and slump next to him, running a finger under my collar. I can't remember the last time I was forced to wear a tie. As some of the other kids who were asked to speak go up, I lose focus. I would cry, but I'm just numb and surprised more than anything else. And maybe a little stoned. I guess it's never much of a surprise when someone from our "group" ends up dead, but this was Jimmy. He was invincible.

After everyone's saying trivial things about how missed he'll be and how sad it is he's gone so soon, we shuffle out to the graveyard where his casket's ready to be lowered into the ground. As we walk behind all the people who showed up so it would look like they gave a damn, I am reminded of the day Jimmy died. When we found him, there in the rain on the bridge. Made open casket impossible.

Michael and I leave before the whole thing actually ends so we don't have to talk to anyone afterward. My stepdad tries to talk to me, but I walk faster, pulling Michael along. Instead of going back to my house, I just drive Michael and myself over to his house. His dad travels all over the place so he's never home, and his mom died when he was three, so we'll have the house to ourselves at least. As soon as I pull up, Michael is out the door and upstairs, probably to plug into his amp and play his guitar until he can't think through the noise. Lucky bastard.

I think about playing my guitar, but instead I find myself sitting in front of a blank page in my notebook, a pen in hand. Shit. I don't want to write, but the first few verses just start flowing, and I get caught in it.

_My heart is beating from me_   
_I'm standing all alone_   
_Please call me only_   
_If you are coming home_   
_Waste another year flies by_   
_Waste a night or two_

I keep writing until my hand cramps up and I can't think anymore, and then I flash back to the day I met Jimmy. My first day of high school.

Of course, in this shit town, you're going through school with basically the same people you went into first grade with. So of course, the same people who hated you through elementary and middle school hate you right on through high school. Because of this, I was being dragged down the hallway the first day of school by my favorite person in the world, getting slammed into the lockers every three feet.

I was playing a fun little game I like to call "Guess the Second." In this game, you guess how many seconds it'll take between slams when you see the bully coming, and then count and see how close you were. This game usually lasts until I hit my head too many times and I have a hard time remembering my last name, let alone how many seconds last time was. However, this time I only got slammed maybe five times. Then I was let go as fast as I was grabbed, and in surprise I promptly sat down, straight on my ass.

My savior, a skinny tall boy with spiky black hair and a permanent mischievous look in his eyes who seemed to be an upperclassman, was hauling said bully down the hallway, banging him into every other locker. He was yelling at him, things like ' _ how do you like that' _ and ' _ you don't own these halls _ .' I just watched in awe as a teacher ran into the hallway, and then pried the guy off my uh, friend. The teacher, a stressed looking dude with more sweat on his head than hair marched the upperclassman back down the hallway towards me. As they passed, the student winked.

This is how I met Jimmy. He came and found me at lunch, introducing himself by telling me he just earned a week of detention. I stammered out an apology but he just held up his hand, slid into the bench across from Michael and me, and stuck out his hand.

"Jimmy. Nice to meet you." I shook his hand, and had to elbow Michael, who was staring at him in confusion. He snapped out of it, and from then on Jimmy sat with us at lunch. It turned out that he was just a sophomore, but we thought he was practically God, or at least an angel sent down to protect us. I guess it turned out in the end that he could help other people a whole lot better than he could help himself.

Thanks to Jimmy, we went through the majority of freshman year out of the line of fire from bullies. We'd get hazed in the halls, but Jimmy always seemed to come around before shit really hit the fan. Our little group expanded. In the middle of the year a strange kid who wouldn't tell anyone his name joined the group. We were reluctant at first, but Michael and I wanted to start a band and he was a fantastic drummer. He killed himself the end of sophomore year, God rest his soul. Or not. I hear hanging yourself from the rafters in your garage is a sin.

Soon the table was full, but none of us flattered ourselves that we were the reason of the group. True, we all had a lot in common. Black was a constant, and so were bruises for a lot of us. We all came from broken or dysfunctional families, and we all practically worshipped Jimmy. Most days of the week, he'd just sit there, listening and keeping us out of harm's way. But Fridays, Fridays were the best. Friday was the day when Jimmy started talking.

The first day, he told us about tagging. How the graffiti that we'd all noticed popping up around the city was all him, the messages that said things like ' _ son of rage and love' _ and ' _ the kids of war and peace' _ with silhouettes of a boy slouching with baggy clothes. Some of them haven't been painted over yet. The next week, on Friday, no one dared to talk. When new kids came along, they were usually smart enough to follow our example and just shut up when Jimmy started.

One day, our newest member, some skinny kid whose name I still couldn't care less about, had the audacity to start chatting as Jimmy was telling us about running from the cops after his latest tagging episode. Jimmy noticed and stopped talking, just gazing intently at the kid. Finally the guy got a clue and shut his trap, and then Jimmy said something I'll never forget.

"Listen, kid," he started, making eye contact. Ironically, Jimmy was just a year ahead of us. We were all still afraid of him, no matter how much protection we got from him. Anyways, he continued, all of us dumbstruck and staring: "You talk incessantly every day of the week. It's Friday, and I figure every once in awhile you all might want to hear something worth hearing. So shut the fuck up on Fridays and just listen. Don't like it, there are plenty of other tables you can sit at." And so began the unspoken rule to shut the fuck up on Fridays. Any words from Jimmy were far too valuable to miss.

Jimmy's stories progressed, from tagging escapades to fights in liquor store parking lots, to house troubles. He would mention his deadbeat dad, and occasionally his mother. He never talked about her much, but from what we could understand she either wasn't in the picture or he didn't allow her to be. No one dared ask. Some days, if we were really lucky, Jimmy would be in rant mode. He would stop thinking about filtering what he was saying and would just start talking.

Jimmy single-handedly instilled a sense of anti-authority in all of us. His rants varied from the 'fucked-up blind patriotism we're raised with' to how 'authority exists just to be challenged.' Then he started talking about bands. He started bringing a little boombox to school, playing songs for us by bands like Rancid and Black Flag, and other stuff. He listened to punk a lot, but sometimes he'd play heavier stuff. I made a habit of scrawling bands on my hands that he played at lunch, even if my mom would bleach my skin to get the ink off my hand. I think I got burned once or twice, but the music was worth it.

Michael, nameless boy, and I started our little band at the beginning of the second semester of freshman year. We had no idea what to call ourselves, but one day Jimmy showed up to school super high and called it a green day, and we had our name. Green Day. We mostly just messed around, but we did record a few songs on shitty equipment just to see how we would sound. Michael's dad was in the music industry so we did have access to semi-decent recording studios occasionally, and it was there that we made our tapes. One of our first songs was called Walking Contradiction, and I can remember how excited I was to show it to Jimmy. I handed him the track with trembling hands, and he shrugged before taking the tape from me and promptly shoving it in his walkman.

The next Friday, he played the track on his boom box. I felt like I had won the lottery, and Michael almost passed out, he was so surprised. Jimmy didn't say anything, just sat there and smiled vaguely. People would pass by and say snide things about our 'freak show' or the loud music, but he serenely rested his hand, middle finger lifted high, on the edge of the table facing the majority of the student body. 

To most people, he was a horrible influence. He smoked both cigarettes and joints, he drank on the daily, and he cussed more than a seasoned sailor. He tagged, he hated people who gave instructions, and he had no goals in life. And yet, we were all drawn to him because he was just so goddamned interesting. He saved all of our asses, and yet we all got the impression that he hated us.

I started writing more and more thanks to Jimmy, and often when Friday would roll around I would sit patiently with my notebook. I'd jot down practically everything he said, and then I'd go through and take the good lines (the majority of them) and turn them into songs. A lot of these I put away for later use, but some of them made it into the music I wrote then.

The first time I found out that Jimmy actually cared was when he came up to me in the hallway and told me to give him any other tracks that we had recorded. He was surprisingly sober, and I could see a bruise on his cheek. He leaned against the lockers, his face turned away from the flow of student traffic in the hallway. I didn't have any at the time, but I just stood there awkwardly and dug around in my locker. I could have sworn I saw a tear trail down his cheek before he caught me looking at him, and he walked away. I gave him Basket Case and Welcome to Paradise the next day, and he was playing them for everyone the same week.

After the bruises started appearing on Jimmy, he drank almost every day and started in on harder drugs. His lunches usually consisted of a handful of antidepressants and ADHD pills and a soda or an energy drink, so I started sneaking extra food and slipping it to him. He stared at me for a few seconds the first time I slid him an apple, smiled faintly, and bit into it, looking away from me. I didn't miss the tears in his eyes, though.

As the year progressed, I started to learn about what Jimmy liked and disliked when it came to food, and began to pack accordingly. He always smiled a bit more when I brought him an apple, so I made sure to snag one every morning. Although he usually was pretty aloof, not letting himself get too close to anyone in our group, I could tell Jimmy liked me, or at least tolerated me more than the others. He would always ask me about the band in his quiet, nonchalant manner, but the way his eyes glinted whenever he asked me told me that Jimmy was proud of our progress.

The summer between freshman year and sophomore year was one of the best summers of my life. Michael, No-Name, and I started to play local shows in bars occasionally if the owners were feeling lenient, and after the shows (Jimmy didn't miss a single one), we would stay out late at night, cruising the town in Jimmy's dad's car. He had gotten his license as soon as he could, and his dad was usually so drunk by the time six came around every evening that the car being absent went unnoticed.

Cruising around was our favorite pastime, and usually there were way more kids riding in the car than was allowed. We stayed out until two in the morning most nights, hanging around the drive-in or the local skating rink, smoking cigarettes in the parking lots or fighting each other when we got bored. Jimmy showed us a few tricks, claiming he used to train with a boxer, and we watched him fight with awe and admiration. Everyone would get dropped off at home in the early hours of the morning, dead tired and with scrapes and bruises, but everyone was smiling.

Everyone except Jimmy. He laughed with us, and he smiled occasionally, but there was an unmistakable sadness in his eyes that he just couldn't shake. At the end of the night, when I was the last kid left in the car, we cruised around a little bit longer. I always brought along a tape with the latest songs that Green Day had finished, and we listened to them until we would inevitably pull up to the curb in front of my house. It was during these solitary drives (since I lived right around the corner from Jimmy's house) that I told Jimmy all about my stepdad, who I hated with a passion and avoided at all costs. He was fat, he was a drunk, and he made it so that I couldn't even recognize my mom anymore. She didn't act like she used to, and I couldn't stand being around her.

It was also during these drives that Jimmy began to rant about his home life. Apparently his dad enjoyed beating him whenever he felt a whim, and his mother was often sick and not fit to take care of Jimmy. When he pulled up in front of my house, I would linger in his car for almost an hour, letting him talk before he slowly came to a stop, staring out at the street light that always blinked on and off on my street. When he stopped, he would sigh heavily and then look over at me, cracking a watery smile and rubbing the tears out of his eyes. I would smile back, my head clouding with worry.

"Go on, get out of here. Your mom's gonna kill me if I keep you out here any longer," he always said, nodding at my house. The porch light was always on, and my mom was always either sitting on the couch with a frown on her face or asleep, leaned back against the cushions. I always either ignored her as she yelled at me, heading straight to my room, or I pulled a blanket off the back of the couch and threw it over her.

She inevitably stopped staying up when I never came home before midnight.

Sophomore year sprung itself on me just as I had really begun to love life. Jimmy was still in a dark place, but we had actually become tight over the summer, and I prided myself in being able to say that I was one of his closest (if not only) friends. Because of this, I couldn't help but notice that Jimmy had gotten shockingly skinny over the summer, and I hated myself for not noticing that he never ate when everyone else did. He stopped accepting my food, but he would always take the apples, and soon they were the only thing I would bring to school.

With the new year came new outcasts that joined our table. Soon we were taking up a whole row of the plastic tables, still in the corner of the cafeteria away from most of the rest of the school. Jimmy was a junior now, and he had grown almost six inches over the summer. I had grown a bit, but nowhere near Jimmy's height, and as long as he was alive I would look up to him. I guess I still do, but not literally anymore. The thought chills me to the bone.

Jimmy commanded everyone's attention, and the younger kids soon learned the unspoken Friday rule. He repeated a lot of the advice that he had given us freshmen the year before, but we listened just as attentively because we knew how valuable it was.

That year was the year of getting in trouble. At least two or three of us were in detention every day after school, and practically the whole group would wait around for them to get out. It became a bit of a ritual to sit around at the front of the school and applaud the kid coming out of detention afterwards. More often than not, it was Jimmy. He got pegged for everything from breaking the dress code ("apparently you have to wear shoes and a shirt to school," he told us after he got out one day, without either) to carrying around his boom box in the halls, blaring Pantera (the best day of my life). Since I was walking around with Jimmy that day, I was written up too, and I proudly attended detention with him.

Detention was the biggest joke of school. It was meant to be punishment for misbehavior, but the teacher who was forced to stay after school didn't care to enforce the kids, and everyone just did their own thing. We spent the Pantera day sitting on opposite ends of the classroom, throwing a ball of paper back and forth and yell-singing one of the older Green Day songs that we had listened to so much that everyone knew the words. Walking Contradiction was one of the group's favorites, and it was constantly being played in cars and on the boom box.

No-name killed himself abruptly; no one saw it coming, and we were shocked for months afterwards. Apparently his brother had died in a car accident and he was being bullied outside of school. There were other reasons, but I didn't stick around to hear them if anyone was talking. We moved on though, as people tend to do, and Michael and I invited our friend Tré into the band as our new drummer. He was good, and we kept on, but I never could forget No-name. I miss him still.

Halfway through his junior year, Jimmy started hinting at trying to commit suicide as well. It popped up casually occasionally, scaring me half to death. The younger kids didn't really catch the references, but Michael and I shared knowing looks and I made a mental note to talk to Jimmy alone every time he started to talk that way. Jimmy and I spent a lot of the afternoons after school when Green Day wasn't practicing sitting out on the bridge over the river by our houses, talking through things. I can't remember how many times I talked Jimmy out of throwing himself over the edge, and I still remember the gut wrenching feeling I got every time he would clamber over the railing and dangle his legs over the water. In fact, every time I cross that bridge in my car now I end up holding onto the steering wheel so hard that my knuckles go white and my hands cramp.

Around this time, I met my first girlfriend Maria. She was beautiful, she was punk, she didn't give a shit about authority, and at that age, I thought I loved her. I even wrote a song and named it after her during the school year, which ironically turned out pretty well because she ended up dumping me and the chorus said "Maria, where did you go". She got a few more songs written about her over the years, and of the memories I have of our time, most of them are pretty good. She was an excellent distraction from the train wreck that was everything to do with Jimmy, but I did have to juggle time. My afternoons were filled with band practice, spending time with Maria, and keeping Jimmy alive (which was probably the hardest of the three).

Jimmy began to carve words into his skin, and he started to wear hoodies everywhere so it was hard for me to assess the damage. Every time I would express concern about his wellbeing, he would shrug me off and tell me that he was doing fine. He was so obviously not doing fine. Some freshman accidentally pulled his sleeve up trying to get his attention in the hall, and before he could pull it back down I caught a glimpse of the word worthless etched into his forearm. He shook his head at me, sighing, and then talked to the kid for a while. Later at the bridge, he downed six Ritalin capsules and drank his bottle of root beer balanced precariously on the metal railing. I stood right next to him, my hand casually propped against the railing behind him, ready to grab onto his sweatshirt if need be.

He overdosed that night, and the rumor was that he had taken too much cocaine. He was gone for two weeks, off to some rehab place. Those two weeks were complete hell. It was then that Maria broke it off, telling me that I was too preoccupied with my friends and wasn't a good boyfriend. I think I was drunk when she told me, because I just shrugged and watched her go. After the fact, I was sort of relieved I didn't have to deal with her anymore, although I did like her an awful lot.

The day Jimmy came back, my stepdad caught me shoveling apples into my backpack to keep in my locker for Jimmy, and he beat me until I couldn't see straight. My mom was in the shower, and by the time she came downstairs I was long gone. All that was left behind was the apples and a bit of my blood on the kitchen floor. Jimmy was livid, but I was too happy to see him to dwell on the pain I was feeling. It wasn't until lunch that my day started to go really downhill; I realized I had no food and sat at the table awkwardly, picking at my nails. Tré accidentally bumped into my side as he sat down and I winced, letting out a hiss of pain as he elbowed my ribs. Jimmy raised an eyebrow and gently lifted my shirt halfway up, revealing my torso, littered with red and purple bruises. Jimmy clenched his fist so tight that when he unfurled his hand, I could see little white crescents where his fingernails had dug into his palm.

Halfway through lunch, Jimmy stood up abruptly and pulled me to my feet, dragging me out of the cafeteria. He led me down the hall, heading towards his locker. There, he pulled out a shake-to-activate ice pack and a little bottle. I sat on the floor next to him, accepting the ice pack and watching as he shook two little pills out into his palm.

"What's that?"

"Novocain." Of course it wasn't; Novocain doesn't come in pill form, but I knocked them back anyway, and soon the swelling in my bruises started to go down, and I felt alright.

I didn't go home that night; Jimmy adamantly told me that Brad (my stepdad) was a complete and utter asshole and that if he ever touched me again, Jimmy was going to personally cut Brad's fingers off. He dropped me off at Michael's house, where I slept peacefully on the couch. It was the first full night's sleep I had gotten in months.

Jimmy, unfortunately, did not fare as well. He came to school the next day pale and weak, and at lunch he sat with his head down and his hood on, music blaring in his ears from his walkman. Halfway through the lunch period, I noticed something soaking through his hoodie sleeve. He had a deep gash running across his wrist that had not been tended to at all, and I thought he was going to die right then and there. We rushed him to the front office and he was at the hospital for another week, under suicide watch.

Miraculously, Jimmy made it through junior year to the summer, and things seemed to go better. He still talked about suicide, and he was still taking harder drugs than I had ever encountered, but he was alive. He taught me to drive that summer, and we had many long, rambling conversations driving the county roads outside of town. It was during these drives when I got a lot of my inspiration for the songs that the band came out with; Jimmy never stopped talking and most of what he had to say was perfect for lyrics.

It was the stuff Jimmy said that wasn't so good for songs that really got me thinking, however. He said one line that always stuck with me, one that I couldn't bear to put to music.

"Life clings to me like a disease," he told me one night as I was driving slowly along some back street. I stayed silent, letting him talk. "No matter what I try, I can't seem to shake it."

"I don't want you to," I told him honestly.

"I just wasn't meant for this world for too long," he mused, and we fell silent for the rest of the drive, save for the music playing quietly in the background.

He ran away the next week, leaving nothing but a new painting of a hand holding onto a grenade in the shape of a heart on the back wall of a local liquor store. Under it was sprayed I'll be back. We waited.

Sure enough, he was back in a month, right before school started. Going into the school year, we began to refer to him as Saint Jimmy, a name that he chuckled at every time he heard it. None of us was religious, and we were told that we were blaspheming, but that only fueled us. It was just another way we flipped off authority, and we loved it. Tré called him the "Jesus of Suburbia" one day, and I jotted down the phrase for later use.

I met my second girlfriend during the first few weeks of my junior year. For the life of me, I can't remember her name, but we all referred to her fondly as Whatshername anyway. Jimmy even took a liking to her, and her transition into the group was pretty seamless. She transferred from a school across town, and she was a junior as well. She and Jimmy were very similar in that I was always running to keep up with their antics. Whatshername gave Jimmy a run for his money when it came to rebellion, and they started having a competition to see who could end up in detention the most during that first semester.

Jimmy and Whatshername ended up tying by the time Christmas break came around, with a grand total of 57 each. We spent that short break playing street hockey and throwing dirty snow at each other, and between Whatshername and Jimmy, I was kept on my toes. That is, until Jimmy ran away right after Christmas. He had been having problems and fights with his dad, and without saying a word to any of us, he split. All he left behind was his boom box on my porch, but he kept the stack of demo tapes I had given him, so I knew he would be back.

Sure enough, three weeks back into school, Jimmy showed up. He was a bit of a legend now, like Huck Finn. Everyone's parents hated him for his bad influence, but to us kids, he was like the second coming of Jesus. Hence the "Jesus of Suburbia" nickname.

When he came back, we went out for a drive and I let him know that it really scared me when he left. He apologized, but I couldn't get him to promise me not to leave again, so I kept an eye on him and tried to make the point that he would be missed if he ever left for good.

Jimmy didn't get the message. Right after he graduated (he didn't walk, of course), we found a message spray-painted in bold red letters on an abandoned warehouse around the corner from the drive-ins.

_ To the kids of war and peace: _

_ Don't follow me where I'm going. Who else is going to stir up trouble when I'm gone? Some day you'll see. When you've gotten to where I am, it's not over until you're underground. I can't take this place, and I can't leave it behind. Don't wear out my name, fuckers. _

_ St. Jimmy _

Michael and I found it first, and we stared at each other in horror for a while until racing to the bridge. It was too late; Jimmy was slouched against the railing, a gun next to him and a sizeable hole in his head. It was raining in June, and his blood made red streaks on the sidewalk, dripping into the river. Michael almost threw up when he saw the brains splattered against the pavement, but all I could do was stare in mute horror.

The police came, and by the end of the day you couldn't even tell Jimmy had died on that bridge. Every time I pass, though, all I can see is his lifeless body, limp on the side of the road, soaked by the rain and so, so pale.

I guess he wasn't lying when he told me he wasn't long for the earth.

The song I started writing before I got lost in reminiscing about Jimmy sits staring up at me from the page. I can hear Michael upstairs, playing a melancholy riff on his guitar. I turn the page and blank out, resting my forehead against it. My tie is choking me and I tug it off, unbuttoning my shirt halfway and shoving the sleeves up to my elbows. The black dress shirt is a little bit too small, and I've had it since freshman year.

Since I met Jimmy.

It was his.

I cry now, and the tears come easily. They build on my lashes, slipping down my face as they escape from my closed eyelids. I am spotting my new page but I don't care; I don't care about anything anymore. I haven't seen Whatshername since school ended and I don't think I will. Everything seems so pointless, and I hate myself for breathing. For still being here when Jimmy is gone. Bitterly, I open my eyes and begin to scrawl.

_ It's something unpredictable, but in the end it's right _

_ I hope you had the time of your life. _

I hate the words, but I know they're true. I hate a lot right now, so I don't pay any attention to it. I'm sober again, and it makes my head pound, being able to hear all of my thoughts.

No wonder Jimmy was always high or drunk. I can understand the temptation.

I fall asleep on that paper, and when I wake up the words are smudged and almost unintelligible. Michael's dad is in the kitchen, making breakfast, and Michael is sitting next to me at the table. He smiles wanly at me, and I can tell he cried himself to sleep as well. We eat the eggs Mr. Dirnt makes out of habit more than hunger, and then we sit together in the living room, flipping through the channels on the television without watching it.

In a couple of weeks, the group gets back together. We all meet at the skating rink, and I'm surprised to see most of the younger kids looking up to me. I have silently, completely unwittingly become the new leader of the group, and now I can tell it's up to me to take these kids under my wings. I look around at all of them, some of whom have been with me since my first day of high school, and some of whom just joined the group this past school year. No one is smiling. So I stand up, and I walk around, looking at everyone and thinking of what to say.

"Life goes on," I begin, and I immediately have the attention of all of the kids here. "For Jimmy, it doesn't, and that's hard, but we're all still here, and god dammit, we're going to stay that way. No one else can take the easy way out; we're in this till the end. You guys need to be strong, because when I'm gone, when Michael is gone, when Tré is gone, when all the seniors are gone, you guys will have to step up. We have to be here for each other, and we have to be here for the kids who will join us. We're the kids of war and peace; that's what Jimmy called us. We just got through the war, and here's the peace: a summer away from school, to recuperate from our losses and forget about our struggles for a while.

"I know that losing Jimmy really hit me hard. He was one of my best friends, and I looked up to that fucker more than anyone in my life. So for him, I'm going to give any and all authority that has the fucking nerve to try and make me conform the middle finger. I'm not going to be an American idiot, because Jimmy wasn't one, and he wouldn't want us to be either. I'm going to live, and I'm going to fight, and I'm going to love, and I'm going to do it for Jimmy." When I look up, everyone is staring at me, and I see a few tears and awestruck expressions. I look up to the sky and continue. "Saint Jimmy, wherever you are, we live for you."

Green Day really took off as soon as Mike, Tré, and I graduated from high school, and none of us went to college. Instead, we spent a lot of time writing and performing songs, and soon we were playing gigs around town and in surrounding cities. I was in the process of writing a new album that I felt would finally lay to rest everything that had happened through high school, with Jimmy and Whatshername. I hadn't seen her since junior year ended, but I never felt like I got closure regarding our relationship.

I think I run into her on the street one day as I'm walking downtown to meet an old friend, and the encounter sends my mind reeling. At the coffee shop where I'm supposed to meet my friend, I pull out an old receipt and jot down a few lines that pop into my head, and soon I have a new song called Whatshername for the album.

The album comes out in the fall, and it is met with wild success. I'm shocked by the response, and Mike, Tré, and I are set for a tour. Every time I play our song St. Jimmy onstage I tear up, and occasionally I get choked up when we perform Homecoming.

Deep in my heart, I'm waiting for a miracle; I'm waiting for Jimmy to come home.


	2. The End

Thank you for coming along with me on this journey. It's been an emotional one for me, not because I can directly relate to the outcome in this book, but because what started off as a fan fiction about Green Day turned into so much more.

I can relate to Saint Jimmy so much, and the same with Billie Joe in this story. I know how it feels to watch out for your friends, and I know how it feels to be a part of a minority group. I know how it feels to be shoved around and talked about and spit on, and I know how it feels to fight back. My plea to myself and to all my readers is to learn from Jimmy, but to be stronger than Jimmy could be. We don't need anymore martyrs; Jimmy died, and we can be strong for him instead.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, be your friends' Jimmy. Protect them, talk to them, be there for them, and treat them like shit if they're being assholes. Make sure that they know that they are important, and make sure that they know that their creativity lives on through everything that happens, whatever shit you guys are put through.

You be your own Jimmy.

And if you need one, I will be your Jimmy. I will fight your battles, I will play your songs, I will kill just for you to stay alive.

We are the kids of war and peace, and the sons and daughters of rage and love.

And we will survive.

  
This originally started out as a fictional 'how Green Day came to be’ thing, and I guess it stayed that way. But it also became so much more. Saint Jimmy might be my most important story (to me, at least), and it just resonates so much in my life.

Saint Jimmy is not just a "how this happened" story. It's a story of the rejects, the losers, the addicts, and the rebels. For those of us who don't fit in at school, at home, or anywhere sometimes. Those of us who are different and celebrate it; for the sons and daughters of rage and love.

Listen to Homecoming by Green Day - _really_ listen - and you'll understand.

Okay, well not the part about Billie Joe being in a rock and roll band, but the rest of it.

 


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